Category: Books

I just read a Regency-set historical romance – part of a bestselling series by a bestselling author. It has 80+ customer reviews on Amazon with a 4.5 star average rating. Which makes me wonder if I am crazy, because I thought it was an embarrassment to the genre.

This is not a self-published book, so the anachronisms, Americanisms, and errors ought to have been corrected in the copy edit stage. It’s “lightning,” not “lightening,” and normally one perceives it prior to hearing thunder, not afterward. This error occurred multiple times, so it was not a typo; I honestly can’t imagine what you would call it other than a “I’m-writing-to-deadline-and-don’t-have-time-to-correct-anything” boo-boo. Regency-era children rarely exclaimed “Wow!” – and if they did, an adult would likely not respond, “Wow is right!” And everyone in this book, including the children, addresses everyone by first name regardless of their station, relationship, or length of acquaintance. Nobody takes offense, corrects the children (“Please don’t call the vicar ‘Joe,’ dear”), or apologizes. There are holes in the plot, but since the heroine’s emotions repeatedly “purl” in her belly, perhaps the author intended to knit the holes together at some point.

Am I peeved? Yes. This is the kind of book that gives my beloved genre a bad name. Reading all the uncritical raves on Amazon fills me with anxiety, because I can easily imagine someone buying this book based on the reviews … and what if that person is not a romance reader? What if that person has decided to try their first romance novel ever, having been told by their friends that they should stop sneering at a genre they know nothing about, and this is the one they pick up? Ai yi yi.

I wrote this blog post years ago and never posted it because I was afraid someone would recognize the author or book. Now that sufficient time has elapsed, I am going to post it. Because I know I am not the only reader who cares about this stuff.

Self-published books — which this one was not — frequently suffer from editorial neglect, and I hope any of you who notice errors in my work will report them to me, since I alone am responsible for corrections. But this author had a publishing team at her back, and they let her down. Wow, did they ever let her down! Wow is right!

I am not a believer in book promotion. The only time I buy a book based on an author’s tweet is when I am already a fan of said author and have been eagerly awaiting his/her next release. I tune out the constant background noise on social media urging me to try this author or that, trumpeting the release of books that don’t interest me written by people I’ve never heard of. This is why I limit my own promotion (if you can even call it that) to family, friends, and those dear souls who already follow me. I post and tweet messages along the lines of, “Hey, guess what, Epic Cool is finally out. I bet you thought I’d never finish it.”

Except once.

A little over a year ago, I was approached by someone who was starting up an author/book promotion business. This person was so kind, and so persistent, and so cheap … one dollar! For a year’s worth of regular tweets! … that I finally relented and gave her a dollar.

I did not anticipate that I would find tweets promoting my own books just as annoying as all the other book promotions flooding my Twitter feed. Nor that the tweets would be composed by people who were not fluent in English. A tweet recommending The Fortune Hunter by someone who clearly lacks the language proficiency to have read it is not a convincing endorsement. For over a year now, my Twitter feed has been filled with images of my covers accompanied by messages like, “Don’t miss to read this #fiction book” and “Read author @DianeFarr amazing Book.” :sigh: Bless their little well-meaning hearts.

My brain can only handle about two days of RWA before it fries. I wouldn’t miss a minute of it—I wouldn’t dare, for fear I’d miss the best minute ever—but as I sit here in the San Diego airport, waiting for my flight back to the real world, I am feeling so inspired, so energized, so filled with information, gossip, tips, data, and carbohydrates, that I can barely think, let alone write. I am fit only for Candy Crush at this point, but the airport charges for wifi. So forget it.

The conference hashtag (#RWA16) will fade into history, the awards will find their permanent resting place on mantelpieces and bookshelves across the English-speaking world, and all the excitement fizzing in the air at the Marriott Marquis will scatter with the attendees and disperse. But as the old lyric says, the melody lingers on. The word “amazing” is used so indiscriminately today that its original meaning is diluted through overuse, but I’ll risk it. RWA is an amazing organization, and I mean that in the original, jaw-dropping way.

Are women truly wired differently than men are? Why are other creative organizations so cutthroat, and Romance Writers of America so nurturing? I don’t have an answer for it that doesn’t sound sexist, so I’ll simply thank them …us … for consistently amazing me. Every conference is uplifting as well as informative. Members who have progressed in their careers are cheered on, and members who have not progressed are supported, surrounded, encouraged, and counseled. It’s like a sisterhood—a sisterhood that includes men. I saw far more men, and a more interesting variety of skin tones, than I did even a few years ago at RWA12. White women, move over. A lot of new voices are offering tales of human pair bonding in all its myriad forms! This afternoon, for the first time, I read a romance featuring “black folk.” It was fantastic. Multicultural romances are going mainstream, and it’s way past time.

Like everyone else in America, I am so done with this week. One of the pleasures of traveling to San Diego to attend the Romance Writers of America conference will be the utter absence of news. For heaven’s sake, people, behave yourselves while I’m gone. When I come back to the real world, I’d like to find you all sitting around a campfire, roasting marshmallows and telling jokes.

Someone please make arrangements and send out the evites. I’d do it myself, but I have to pack …

In 2011, I was still a newbie at self-publishing. But, come to think of it, everyone was. That’s how fast times have changed! In this interview I dish the dirt about the good and bad on both sides of the street: traditional publishing and self-publishing.

Q: Can you compare self-publishing to traditional publishing? Is one easier than the other? Do you like having more control over the process?

A: This has been a long, strange journey for me, full of twists and surprises. I was once a traditionally-published author who honestly believed that self-publishing was mostly—not entirely, but mostly—a consolation prize. In other words, I thought it was for losers.

It seemed glaringly obvious to me that e-publishing, even through a legitimate e-publisher, was so inferior to traditional print publishing that no author in her right mind would consider it as anything other than a last resort—or, rather, a next-to-last resort. Because self-pubbing was surely the last resort; the final destination for manuscripts that had been rejected everywhere else.

That may have been true a few years ago, but publishing has changed so quickly that savvy authors are now giving self-publishing a serious look—in some cases, even before submitting to traditional publishers. And that’s a sea change.

I got caught in the current when I transitioned from writing Regency Historicals to writing YA paranormal. Traditional publishers kept me dangling, unsure if my readership would follow me into a new genre, claiming to “love” my Wicked Cool, but…but…but. I suppose I had grown spoiled, over the years, expecting my books to be bought on proposal. I had “proven” myself—but only in my genre. By changing genres, I had stepped back into the role of newbie. Now I had to produce actual chapters! In fact, I was expected to deliver a complete manuscript before they would take me seriously. I kept working, but I grew impatient.

Finally, a reputable publisher “fell in love” (their words) with Wicked Cool. I had a couple of fabulous telephone conferences with my new editor. Received a contract. Signed it. Returned it. And never heard from the editor or the publisher again.

Now, publishing is a strange and quirky business, but that experience was the last straw. I pulled the plug on Wicked Cool, thanked my agent for all her hard (albeit fruitless) work, and gave it to an e-publisher—who snapped it up with an alacrity very soothing to my bruised ego.

I didn’t expect much, and I didn’t receive much. (Remember, at this point I considered e-publishing the “better than nothing” alternative.) I was pleased to have the book available, professionally edited and with nice cover art. But a few months after publishing Wicked Cool, my e-publisher revamped their imprint, went all-romance, and gave me back my rights.

“Oh, well,” I thought. “At least now I can self-publish a print version so my sisters can each have a copy.” And I did that. And part of the process of doing that was creating a cover. So I published Wicked Cool to Kindle while I was at it. After all, all the work was already done; the sucker was formatted and had cover art. And publishing to Kindle was free. So what the heck?

Talk about low expectations!

At first, I did absolutely no marketing. I didn’t even add it to my email signature, or talk about it on Facebook, or tweet it. Nothing. My expectations were nil. But, lo and behold, people started buying the book. My first sales were just four or five books a week—a number I found astonishing, frankly. I was absolutely dumbfounded when my sales doubled, then tripled, then went through the roof. (Somewhere along in there, I mentioned it on Facebook and added it to my email signature. But still.) Wicked Cool spent most of the summer as No. 1 on Amazon’s YA paranormal list.

So now…I’m a believer!

You asked me to compare self-publishing to traditional publishing. It’s difficult, because the two experiences are so different. Each has pros and cons.

The “pros” of traditional publishing are pretty obvious. You receive an advance and a contract with a deadline—a combination that often is the difference between finishing the book and not finishing the book. In a perfect world, the advance gives you enough to live on while you write, and the deadline lights a fire under you so you stop procrastinating. Meanwhile, you have a team of professionals at your back—a team that is every bit as invested in your success as you are. Your manuscript will be edited, copy-edited, typeset, proofed, and seen by many pairs of eyes. This helps minimize errors and guarantee that the end product will be as close to perfect as humanly possible. Marketing geniuses will design a cover, write back cover copy, figure out the perfect placement and pricing and who-knows-what, aiming to put your book in the hands of the readers who are most likely to buy it. And let’s not forget the prestige factor. That is not to be taken lightly. It feels really, really good to get picked up by a publisher—especially a “big six” publisher. Looks great on a resume. Or a query letter, for that matter.

The “cons” of traditional publishing may be less obvious, to those who haven’t had the experience. The first, of course, is that it’s really, really hard to get in the door. You have to have talent and you have to have luck. Editors don’t want to see your unagented manuscript, thank you very much, but agents aren’t interested in unpublished writers. Once you somehow get past that Catch-22, there is normally a wait of weeks or months while your manuscript is passed around and discussed (or, worse, sits on someone’s desk untouched—and you will never know which fate has befallen your precious manuscript until the decision is finally announced.) This is your first experience of the glacial pace at which the publishing industry moves, and believe me, it never gets any better or any less frustrating.

After the euphoric moment when you get “the call,” you may wait months for a contract. You sign quickly and return it, and sit patiently by your mailbox for the next weeks or months, waiting for your countersigned copy and your advance. Your book will actually be published a year (or eighteen months, or two years) after that. By this time, your advance is long gone, together with most of your dignity and all your self-esteem. They have vetoed all your ideas, including your chosen title, and slapped a title of their choosing on your work. They have created a cover without consulting you—and, love it or hate it, no changes will be made. (There is still cover art up at Amazon.com for one of my books with my name misspelled.) They have paid the cover artist more than they paid you. They probably paid the copy editor more than they paid you. Maybe they pay their mail room clerk more than they pay you; you’ll never know and you’re probably happier not asking. You are a cog in the machine, and by the time your book comes out you will feel like the least important cog. And it’s best not to borrow any money against the royalties you expect to receive in the future. Because, again, your first royalty statement won’t arrive for another year—yes, that’s right, a year after publication, which was a year or more after signing the contract, which was several months after you got “the call,” which was several months after you or your agent submitted the manuscript—and when it does, it will be an incomprehensible sheet of contradictory numbers with no check attached.

Okay, there may be a check attached. If you’re lucky. But book sales are even harder to predict than the stock market. So don’t get your hopes up, you worthless cog.

You see? Pros and cons…!

But there are pros and cons to self-publishing, too.

The “pros” begin with the absence of gatekeepers. Nobody will ever say “no” to you. You don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval. You don’t even have to wait for feedback or input of any kind. You want to publish something? Publish it.

Oh, wait, that’s a “con” as well as a “pro.” Because the gatekeepers are what gives traditional publishing its well-deserved reputation for quality.

If you self-publish, my best advice is to run it past as many pairs of eyes as you can coax into looking at it. No matter how well you type or how clean your copy is, there will be errors in a novel-length work. You should catch as many as you can.

The author has complete creative control. Again, this is both a “pro” and a “con.” It’s blissful to have no combative personalities to deal with, and nobody you have to handle with kid gloves because they have all the power and you desperately want their approval. When you self-publish, you have all the power, and you can be as nice to yourself as you like. But on the other hand, those editors and marketing people have their jobs because they are excellent at what they do—and some of the changes they browbeat authors into making are changes for the better. Without these people interfering in your business, you will feel much more relaxed and cheerful. But you may be producing an inferior product—and you’ll never even know it.

Your self-publishing ventures will pay you a much, much higher percentage than a traditional publisher is willing to offer. And you won’t have to negotiate to get it. The “con” on this one? You’ll be getting a bigger piece of a smaller pie. Sometimes a much smaller pie. So it can be hard, sometimes impossible, to measure whether you’re better off self-pubbing or trad-pubbing. Sometimes it’s obvious, one way or the other, but often it isn’t.

The next “pro” has no downside, as far as I can tell, and that’s the transparency and immediacy of self-publishing. You will see your sales happening in real time, and money will be deposited directly into your bank account on a monthly basis. There is nothing, nothing like this in traditional publishing. At least not yet.

Here’s the worst “con” that I’ve found with self-publishing, one that can’t be mitigated without incurring expenses that an author may or may not be able to handle: no marketing or art departments! You are going to have to pay for cover art, put up with sucky cover art, or be extremely clever and/or talented. Plus you have to advertise the book yourself, trumpet it via social media, or cross your fingers and hope for the best. From personal experience, I can tell you that it’s difficult to type with crossed fingers. So now you know what method I use.

Thank you, Diana Belchase and the Waterworld Mermaids, for including my Dashing through the Snow among your favorites!

This, by the way, is my first venture into audiobookworld. I chose it because it’s a novella. I figured, how hard can this be? It’s just a novella. I’ll sit down, read it into a microphone, and that’ll be that. After all, I used to be a voiceover actress in Hollywood. I still have my AFTRA card somewhere. Piece of cake, right?

Well … I sort of underestimated this brave new world of DIY. When I was a voiceover talent, I showed up, read my copy, did a take or two (or three), picked up my check and went home. It was probably the easiest acting job in the world. This project didn’t work quite that way. I had to not only read the darn thing, I had to engineer it too. I had to edit out all the dead air and random noises, watch a bunch of YouTube how-to videos on audio compression and blah blah blah, and drive myself crazy applying what I learned.

I was interviewed for Muse Camp recently and allowed to natter on and on about my journey from “trad” publishing to “indie.” For those of you who are interested, you can listen to the interview for free through November 22nd: http://musecamp.com/spe_dianefarr/

Muse Camp is a great site, with inspiring stories, tips, interviews, and support for writers of every stripe. Anyone who has been to summer camp will understand the concept! There’s something about getting away with a group and focusing intently on something for a few days that refreshes the spirit.

Did you watch the Oscars last night? So did I. And since I am simultaneously wrestling with an awards-judging process of my own, I found myself feeling unexpected sympathy for the much-maligned Academy.

Every year, there’s a certain amount of fist-shaking and eye rolling over Oscar nominations. Every year, someone is overlooked who totally should have been included. Every year, someone is nominated based on having been overlooked in the past. (“So-and-so should have been nominated last year, so let’s nominate them now even though their work this year was pretty mediocre.”)

Actually, of course, I have no idea how the nomination process works. But that’s how it seems.

And if you think people get passionate about the Oscars, you should see the brouhaha that goes on over Romance Writers of America’s annual RITA awards.

The RWA Board struggles mightily to be responsive to its large and fractious membership. So each year, the judging rules change, in an attempt to fix whatever people complained about the year before.

Which leads to a chaotic process — and even lousier, less fair nominations than the Oscars deliver.

Romance fiction is the 800-pound gorilla in the publishing world, much the way Hollywood is the 800-pound gorilla in the movie world. Of course there are other books being written and sold, just as there are movies being made elsewhere on Planet Earth. And romance novels, like Hollywood movies, receive their share of sneers — sneers from those who are jealous and sneers from those who are genuinely concerned about artistic quality. And actually, for many of the same reasons. Whenever an art form is really, really popular, commercial success is likely to occur. Once that happens, those who are making money seek to continue making money. And presto, the dreaded “cookie cutter” effect kicks in.

Nevertheless, the RITA is the most prestigious, most coveted award in genre fiction. Like the Oscars, the RITA represents the consensus of one’s peers. It bestows upon its recipient a heady illusion: you, gentle author, have written the best book of its kind among a huge field of contenders.

Have you? Have you really? Maybe. In the final analysis, who cares? You certainly wrote a good book. And now you have a wicked cool golden statuette to prove it.

But I would like to say, to the authors I am not allowed to contact — the ones whose books I am judging this year — you will probably not receive a nomination. At least two of you wrote fantastic books. I loved them. But I disqualified them.

And here is where the RITAs and the Oscars painfully diverge. The RITAs are intended to recognize romance novels. That’s the whole purpose of their existence. But they have become such coveted objects that lately — for the past two years, maybe longer — they attract authors who are not writing romance. I envy the Academy judges, who know, at a minimum, that they are judging a movie. We RITA judges are wrestling with the very definition of the art form.

The heroine of Book A has a boyfriend. This does not make Book A a romance.

The couple at the center of Book B face terrible dangers together. They seem quite devoted to each other, but the book is about facing terrible dangers, not the growth of a relationship. Book B is not a romance.

You’re killing me, people. Either stop writing great books that are not romances, or stop entering them in the RITA contest, I beg of you. Out there, somewhere, are romance authors whose books failed to get through the door because yours arrived first.

I’ve been “tagged” in something called (I believe) a “blog hop.” I’m supposed to answer a few questions about the book I am currently working on, then “tag” the next author — who will post her answers to the same questions next Wednesday and tag someone else. And so on. It’s rather like the white elephant game many of you are playing at your office Christmas party, only without the gifts. Or the option to swap your white elephant with someone else’s if you get something you don’t want. Or the ability to sneak out and go home, or at least check your Facebook page, while everyone else is preoccupied. Or —

Okay, it’s nothing like the white elephant game. Forget it.

Anyway, these are the questions … and my answers.

What is the working title of your book?

It will be a two-word title and the last word will be “Cool.” The first book in the series is WICKED COOL. The second book is SCARY COOL. So this book, the third one, will be, um, “[something] Cool.” The “cools” I am toying with at the moment are WAY COOL, TOO COOL, and WAY PAST COOL. Oh, wait, that’s three words. But it fits better than the others. On the other hand, it’s kind of lame. What about HALF-PAST COOL? Nah, that stinks. Maybe I’ll just call the book BITE ME. Ha, ha! No, I’m not serious. For one thing, somebody’s probably already snagged that title for a vampire book. Hmm. So what is the working title of my book? Let’s go with TOO COOL. For now.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Actually, I don’t have “an” idea for the book at this stage. I have a bunch of ideas, and am choosing which to use and which to toss. Then I have to comb through the ideas I’m keeping and decide which are central and which are secondary. Then I must place them in order of what happens when. Right now, I don’t know what happens in the book. I can’t hazard even a guess as to what the book is about. Frankly, I have no business answering any questions about this book yet and I can’t believe I agreed to do this blog hop.

What genre does your book fall under?

Finally, an easy question! Thank you. Young adult paranormal romance.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I shall urge the director to cast whichever actors do the best job at the auditions.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

“A young man obsessed with death falls for an old woman obsessed with life.” Oh, sorry, that’s Harold & Maude. Crap. Guess I don’t have a synopsis yet.

Will your book be published, self-published or represented by an agency?

Yes.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I haven’t written a single word of it yet. But so far? Two months. And I only wish I were kidding.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

It reminds me a lot of WICKED COOL and SCARY COOL.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

The reviewers of SCARY COOL. So far, every reviewer has given it five stars. And every last one of ‘em seems to expect a “next book in the series.” It’s hard to withstand that sort of pressure, folks.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If I knew the answer to that, believe me, I would tell you. You and everyone else in the English-speaking world.

Now for the good part: the tag for next week’s edition of “The Next Big Thing!” I proudly refer you to Kate Rothwell, who also writes as Summer Devon. Her blog is here, and it’s great fun to read. So are some of her books. I can’t say ALL of her books, because I haven’t read them all — yet. She’s awfully prolific. And by “awfully” I mean I am in awe of her. So “awfully” in the nicest possible sense of the word.

It’s definitely different to be an “indie” author. When I finish a book I must choose what to work on next. Choose! What a concept.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound momentous to most people, but trust me, it’s momentous. There is no one in New York telling me that I must deliver, say, a 75,000-word romance set in Regency England by such-and-such a date. It’s liberating, naturally, but it’s also unsettling to find myself drifting, directionless — and having to make decisions that will affect the next couple of years of my life without the input of a team of interested experts.

Like most authors, I have a number of books knocking around in my brain, clamoring to be written. There’s Book 3 of my unfinished “star” trilogy, for example. Also a sweeping historical saga with lots of “sturm & drang” that my agent had me put together years ago— back in the days when we were trying to move me into, well, sweeping historical sagas with lots of sturm & drang. There’s a Christmas Regency that could be lots of fun, featuring two characters I love so much that I want to spread them out over four books and let everybody around them fall in love and marry off, one after the other, until FINALLY Gavin and Felicity get their happy ending in book 4. There’s at least one novella, which I’m drawn to as possibly easier to finish quickly and get out there. And then there’s the third book in my YA paranormal series, The Spellspinners.

So how to choose?

To my (mild) surprise, I find that a lot of my considerations are the same ones that a publisher would have. For example: Which, of all the possible books I could write, is the one most likely to find an audience? The difficulty with putting this consideration at the top of the list, of course, is that the question is unanswerable. Nobody knows what will sell. And the fact that publishers pretend to know, when in fact their guesses are wrong more often than they are right, has driven authors nuts for decades. So it’s ironic, to say the least, that I find this particular question pressing on me so—now that my fate is in my own hands!

I would love to write a Regency again. What’s stopping me? That darn YA series I foolishly started. Because it’s contemporary. Since the Regencies are set in the past (duh), they can be written any time. A book set in the here & now must be written in the here & now. Otherwise you end up with a Sue Grafton problem. She’s the brilliant author of those Kinsey Millhone “alphabet” mysteries, which started out contemporary but have gradually slid into the past … since Sue can’t write as quickly as Kinsey’s adventures happen. Now she’s stuck writing mysteries set in the 1980’s, and it’s not the 1980’s anymore, and it’s more and more difficult to remember exactly how life really was in the 1980’s (what was playing on the radio that year? Did everybody have a microwave oven or not? etc.). Sue Grafton’s writing historicals now, and I don’t think she intended that when she started out.

I had hoped that Scary Cool would be the end of the series, or at least this portion of the series, but alas, all the reviews seem to be expecting another book. Okay, I guess I did leave a few balls in the air at the end of Scary Cool. So Book 3 must be written. And it must be written next. Leaving all my Regencies still simmering away on the back burner. :sigh: